A number of patents, each including Gharib as an inventor and assigned to California Institute of Technology, cover useful hardware configurations for performing profilometry employing multi-aperture defocusing in connection with a single imager lens and one or more cameras/imagers. These patents include U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,278,847; 7,006,132; 7,612,869 and 7,612,870—all of which are licensed by the assignee hereof and incorporated by reference herein in their entireties. Defocusing principles in which two-dimensional scan data is employed to generate three-dimensional coordinate information can be appreciated in reference to these patents. Further-improved hardware for applying these defocusing principles is described herein.
Irrespective of such hardware improvements, keen positional information is required to aggregate the three dimensional information determined through defocusing in order to map the surface of an object. Such positional information—often referred to as the camera “pose”—may be obtained in different ways. U.S. Pat. No. 7,605,817 to Zhang (assigned to 3M) describes one approach and U.S. Publication No. 2009/0295908 to Gharib (assigned to California Institute of Technology) describes another. Neither approach offers the benefits of the pose techniques described herein.